Day three and I'm already slipping into my sad, retinue of guilty pleasures. This, possibly the guiltiest of them, is aptly named Women Behind Bars. They have lots of shows about men in similar confines, too many. The oppressive law of supply and demand creates a ravenous interest in the female variety. That and the fact that the women seem far more

Metal Figures - Kids out to express their reptilian-brain urges will find it much harder to do bodily harm to an armor-plated cop. The Jean-Claude Van Damme of faux-gumshoes, these sentries will make a kid think twice the next time he swings a bat in anger. The idea has its downsides though. Cars tend to lose control in a skid and may come to a stop atop the slightly mangled officer, but only after inflicting grievous bodily harm on the driver. Oh, and metal cops are no less likely to accept bribes than cardboard ones.

Real Cops - Sri Lanka's concern about the public image of the police causes me to suspect that there may be an underlying insecurity. Stupid as I am about Sri Lanka and it's people, I can offer no reason for this. But I'd be pretty glum too if I was being replaced by cardboard cutouts, which have neither skills of investigation nor the physical strength to subdue. Just watch LivePD. Those are renaissance cops. Must leave their Sri Lankan colleagues feeling downright mopey and in need of emotional uplift.

I don't know much about Sri Lanka. I have a friend that was born in southern India, which is close, but she left at a tender age but of her own free will - back in the day when it didn't occur to us to forcibly separate tender age children from their parents. So she hasn't been able to enlighten me much, so all I really know if that there's been a lot of conflict there over the years. Maybe they made up by now, but that's all I remember.

But I digress. Point is I know nothing about Sri Lanka so I'm in no position to judge. Fox News, that promoter of childhood trauma (I'm gonna keep coming back to that, I promise), reported today that a couple of guys in Sri Lanka tried to bribe a police officer. Since, as I say again, I know nothing about the local scene, I don't know if this is a big deal there. But Fox News thought it was a big enough deal to put it on the wire, which is no surprise I suppose. Probably hoping for harsh criminal penalties for the miscreants, even separation from their obviously incompetent parents, though these dudes were well about tender age. (See)

Well, there's one unusual twist to the story, one that begs for judgement, and not of the litigious variety. The guys were trying to bribe a cardboard dummy. In another example of stupidity's expression in the age of social media, one guy filmed the transaction with his cell phone while the other tried to convince the stoic cop to take the loot. The guys were of tender brain, not age.

No word on the crime the guys were trying to slip out of.

BBC News reports that the delinquents "are charged with damaging public property, and humiliating and creating a bad public image of the police."

So, even though they walked into the situation with their records clean for the day, they left the scene on the way to the police station, where they were charged and released on bail.

You might be wondering why Sri Lanka has cardboard cops strewn around. Well, first of all, while less agile and energetic than living versions, they're pretty damn cheap. Second, if you pose them right and put a speed gun in their hand they either slow drivers down or jolt them into a perilous skid. Finally, they look pretty cool out there.

But they're altogether too prone to damage and mischief. One errant skid, and the thin blue line thins further until a replacement is summoned from the warehouse. And kids, with their impulsive rebelliousness, will go out of their way to create "a bad public image of the police" using spray paint and other weapons of personal destruction.

What can be done to restore the public image of Sri Lanka's public servants?

Teencage

Tender Age Separation - Best way to protect the artificial police is to remove the source of their abuse. We've leaned how to do it here in the US. We call it tender age separation, a bizarre term that invokes both the act's pathos and cruelty. Now that we've taken a sudden interest in exports, lets dump that commodity on unsuspecting overseas markets. Send over a gaggle of ICE trainers to educate our Sri Lankans how to twist adolescent evil-doers from the frantic grips of their parent. No telling what we'll get in return.